As anyone who regularly reads this blog can tell, I’ve been a bit hit and miss in posting lately.  The bride and I have been swamped with work on the Sous Vide Supreme project.  MD has been working with chefs to develop recipes along with creating a bunch herself; she has been editing a book on sous vide for the home cook written by yet another sous vide expert; she’s been posting on the Sous Vide Supreme blog (eggs the sous vide way); and, as you can see at the left, she’s been talking sous vide to anyone who will listen.  All this while she prepares for performing the Messiah in about two weeks.  I’ve been heavily involved in the business end of things, which is a never-ending task.  Plus, I’m the taster-in-chief.  Neither of us dreamed that this would turn into such a time-gobbling project after the development of the machine.  But it has.  It seems that we are spending twice as much time now working in some capacity on  Sous Vide Supreme than we ever did before – even when we were at our busiest.  I’m going to have to work harder on my time management if I expect to keep up with all the other projects – including this blog – that I have going.

Twitter

The sous vide time commitments have put a real hickey on my reading.  I’ve probably read less over the past four months than in any four month period of my life.  Instead of five or six books per week, I’m down to about two or three max.  I hate it.  I’m trying to keep up with my daily medical/scientific journal trawl, but that has even slacked off a bit.  When I do find something of interest, instead of blogging on it as I used to, I stick it up on my Twitter page.  I probably post 10-15 times per day on Twitter, so if you want to keep up on a moment-by-moment basis, follow me on Twitter.  If you have a problem thinking of yourself as a Twitter person, give it a try.  I dipped my toes in the Twitter waters with great hesitation, and now I love it.  I’ve found it extremely valuable because I find all kinds of new stuff daily.  You’ve got to be careful who you follow, however, or you can waste a ton of time.  If you get started, start following people who provide you with information you can use.  I avoid following people who do nothing but tell me what they ate for breakfast that day or what movie they’re going to see that night.  Sign up an give it a go. You don’t have to write anything (or tweet, as it’s called) if you don’t want to.  You can simply lurk and be the beneficiary of a ton of good info.   The Twitter people take you by the hand and get you squared away.  It takes all of about two minutes – if even that.  Literally.

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Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain.  Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew.

In April 1995 an article appeared in the journal Current Anthropology that was an intellectual tour de force and, in my view, an example of a perfect theoretical paper.  “The  Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis” (ETH) by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler demonstrated by a brilliant thought experiment that our species didn’t evolve to eat meat but evolved because it ate meat.

The ETH is an example of the kind of scientific detective work I love.  In fact, this paper is one of my all time favorites.  (An amazing bit of trivia about this paper is that it almost didn’t get published.  I had the opportunity to talk with Leslie Aiello at a meeting a few months ago, and she told me the journal was reluctant to publish the paper because the editors thought it too technical for their readers.  I suspect they also found it too controversial.  Now I’m sure they’re glad they published because I would imagine it is the most cited of all the papers ever published in Current Anthropology.)  The authors methodically lay the scientific foundation for their experiment, then, like Sherlock Holmes, progress step by step, accumulating little pieces of data until they reach the ineluctable conclusion that meat eating made us human. I would like to walk us all through their thought processes as laid out in their brilliant paper.

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Felis silvestris lybica Photo by Noorderlicht

When you get right down to it, house cats are pretty useless. If you’re overrun with mice, cats can be a help, but that’s pretty much it.  They are fiercely  independent and, unlike dogs, which have a want-to-please-their-master nature, cats don’t really give a flip.  They don’t fetch, they don’t roll over, they don’t sit up and beg, and, for the most part, they don’t come when called. If you had a kid who acted like a cat, you would probably put him/her up for adoption. So why are they the most popular house pet in the world today?

Scientists using DNA analysis have determined that virtually all house cats alive today are descended from a specific line of wild cats, Felis silvestris lybica, that are indigenous to the Middle East.  Although there are a number of lines of wildcats throughout the world, mitochondrial DNA analysis of all breeds of house cats appears to indicate they all descended from this one branch of the wildcat family. Read more »

The above comes from the October 1927 issue of Popular Science, (Click here for larger, readable view) and proves to be remarkable prescient in terms of food.

The article overestimates the population growth, predicting for New York City proper

a population of 13,948,000. In the area described as “Greater New York” there will be 17,797,000 people; and in the suburban area the total population, according to figures based on the law of growth described in the June Popular Science Monthly, will be 28,705,000.

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We’ve all had the experience. We go off our low-carb diet for a while, then decide to get serious and get back on the straight and narrow. We start counting every carb and being good as gold, and suddenly we’re fatigued. We find ourselves puffing and panting just walking out to the mailbox. Old time low-carbers know this will pass, but newbies aren’t so sure. No one told them about this, and all they can think of are all the horror stories they’ve been told about low-carb diets.

I’ve had countless people tell me of how they tried a low-carb diet once and got so tired they had to give it up. They then usually tell me that a low-carb diet just doesn’t work for their bodies. I tell them that if they’ll just hang in there a while, it will all get better, and, in fact, they will have more energy and less fatigue than before they started the diet.

There is an adaptation period that takes place when starting a low-carb diet. Someone who has been on a high-carb diet–the standard American diet, for example–has to metabolize a lot of sugar. All metabolic processes require enzymes to carry them out. Our DNA codes for these enzymes, but we don’t make them unless we need them. And when we do need them it takes a while for them to get brought up to the necessary levels. So, when we’re on a high-carb diet, we’ve got a lot of sugar-metabolizing enzymes kicking around, ready to metabolize sugar. All the sugar-metabolizing pathways are working efficiently.

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